How Snickers Used Social Media Outrage to Fuel the Year’s Most Innovative Media Plan

For the next evolution of Snickers’ longtime tagline, “You’re not you when you’re hungry,” MediaCom Melbourne and BBDO linked the public’s general irritability—as measured by internet chatter—with the price of Snickers. The more outraged people got online, the cheaper the candy became at Australian 7-Eleven stores.

“It used social sentiment and connected it so simply to a creative idea and a trade proposition, which made the idea a runner,” says Simon Sadie, MediaCom’s global account director on Mars. “The challenge was how to make it possible.”

The campaign took nearly a year to execute from concept to launch, with assists from MIT and Google. The final custom-built algorithm—or “Hungerithm”—was able to analyze 14,000 social posts a day across platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, even interpreting Aussie slang and sarcasm, to take a virtual fist-shaking temperature of the internet.